Terabitz: a better way to plan your next home purchase

Terabitz is launching a comprehensive site for home buyers wanting to organizing and map information about their prospective homes.

Think of it as a cross between a personal homepage (like iGoogle or Netvibes, for example) and a real estate information site (like Trulia or Zillow).

You can drag and drop housing information from menu bars into a central dashboard with a set of data displays. With one click, you can map this data using the site’s Google Maps mashup.

Besides for-sale listings, there’s information like average local mortgage rates, average rental fees and other real estate information.

You can also find out all sorts of good things about a place that are harder to quantify, like nearby restaurants, libraries, schools, coffee shops. Even the FBI’s crime — and specifically sex offender — database gets included.

This non real estate data is what sets Terabitz, of Palo Alto, Calif. apart from sites like Zillow and Trulia, which also offer home profile pages that are limited mainly to real estate data.

You can customize your own page of data widgets about your prospective home. You can also make an image of your data collection and share it with other users or email to friends.

People want to do deep research about where they might be living, said chief executive Ashfaq Munshi. They want to do more than focus narrowly on the price of real estate, he said. The process may take as long as 18 months for some people. Terabitz is trying to put it all together

Munshi says his family has been through the home-buying and selling process a few times. In fact, his 17 year old son, Kamran, thought of the idea two years ago, after seeing Zillow and thinking he could do better.

The company uses a variety of ways to collect data, from licensing deals with other sites to pulling data directly from web sites. Local Craiglist listings are available through it. It also links to partner sites, including local realtors.

Munshi admitted to us that the space is crowded. His plan is to get out ahead with this launch, and maintain a six to nine month lead over other real estate sites. Notably, Zillow is developing ways to include more community information, as well.

The company hopes to make money by connecting its users with realtors and other local services, charging transaction fees in the process.

Munshi is a veteran Silicon Valley executive, most recently the chief executive of Level 5 Networks. TeraBitz has received $10 million in funding from Tudor Capital, part of the Tudor Hedge Fund Family.